Up Your Expectations of Crane Skip Pans

I was a tower crane guy. One of the roles was as an operator in construction. From small self erecting cranes to over 800’ up in high-rise hanging iron. One of the functions that used to make my eye twitch a bit was in the trash functions. The first half of my career had me working with a clamshell design for trash. It was the technology of the day. Cranes didn’t have as much capacity, so a light trash bin was always wanted. This also made them fragile relative to what we were doing. They’d get stuck because people would put long items in them and that’s not really what they were meant for. It wasn’t the best of scenes. People still use them. I can’t wrap my head around why other than it hard to teach old dogs new tricks.

The other design people use are like our bulk skips. They are a crane skip pan that lifts by four slings. After you fly it to the dumpster, the rigger gets into dumpster to change the rigging around. Surrounded by trash, near heavy steel objects that can shift, Safety Managers in Construction routinely ask their people to get into the dumpsters to change the rigging. Why? It’s what we’ve always done. But we don’t have to.

We manufacture an automated crane trash skip. These are unique in that the latching system is fully automated. No human hand has to touch it. Geometry pushes it to the locked position. The next time you hoist down, it rotates around 60 degrees. When you hoist back up, it clears the pin/lock. It can do it endlessly. There is nothing to break. It just works.

We do these in 19 sizes. They are good for basically 3300 lbs per yard. The 2.6 yard versions of a crane skip pan that asks you to get into a dumpster from other manufacturers is 6000 to 8000 dollars per unit. Then you ship it. Then you buy rigging. Ours with shipping included in the US at 2.6 yards, no rigging required is $6100. If you need multiples, they stack when it comes to shipping. We can save from there. So why don’t you have the safety innovation? Maybe go ask you equipment manager.

Check it out. Let’s demand more from our crane skip pans and ask our employers to stop normalizing risk and asking us to get into dumpsters. It’s a practice we should leave in the dumpster.

Automated Crane Trash Skips by Eichinger.